FASTRA Desktop Supercomputer Built With 4 Nvidia 9800 GX2 Graphics Cards

Looking at new computational methods for tomography—a technique used by medical scanners to create 3D images—University of Antwerp researchers have built a budget supercomputer using four Nvidia 9800 GX2 graphics cards (a total of eight GPUs with 1,024 stream processors) as its super-calculating soul, which "perform as fast as 350 modern CPU cores."

http://gizmodo.com/394128/fastra-des...graphics-cards


I have just started to notice new motherboards with 4 x PCI_ 16 x 16 slots.


Just to add further details on those cards:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...view,1792.html


Here is the Newegg shopping list as per manufacturers:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...24500+-+%24750






...

Yeah but the crux of the porblem is, floating point and shader power in GPU's is HUGE compared to any CPU but in near enough everything else but rendering, they will be far slower than modern CPU's.

Nvidia's trying to port software using CUDA to work on GPU's which they believe will bring vast improvements but such coding is extremely difficult, rare and time costly.

For parallel work, GPU's due to their shader power are known to be extremely powerful hence why they're used in scientific setups very often running specialized coding which can take advantage of their power.

First Look: Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 Series

Nvidia unveils a pair of fast new GeForce graphics processors that tackle a CPU's job.

Nvidia's not playing games. With today's introduction of the GeForce GTX 200 series, the company is giving a graphics processor a whole new role.

Every new GPU ushers in new levels of realism and computational power, but don't call the GeForce GTX 200 Series simply "graphics cards." A little over ten years after games like Tomb Raider and GLQuake hit the scene, a new kind of GPU is being born. Nvidia has designed more than just a DirectX10 board that makes games scream and Vista's Aero interface hum. It's a secondary processor. It's a physics calculator. And it's about time.

The cards will sell in two flavors. The first, a high-end GeForce GTX 280 with 240 processors and 1GB of frame buffer memory, sells at a spit-take-worthy price of $649 starting June 17. (As expensive as that may sound -- and it is -- this is the consistent ceiling price for high-end consumer cards these days). The more "mainstream" model, the $399 GeForce GTX 260, ships June 25with 192 processors and a 896MB frame buffer.

...more (CUDA) etc.

PC World - First Look: Nvidia GeForce GTX 200 Series